English Language Arts and Literacy

Reading

Districts interested in any of the following professional
learning opportunities can contact the Council’s Director of Language Arts and
Literacy, Robin Hall (rhall@cgcs.org).

The Council conducts two-day writing conferences including a
component to address writing in mathematics. The literacy component focuses on student’s
use of knowledge gained from a series of texts on a specific topic in order to
produce effective argumentative compositions. The conference presents practical
approaches for teaching argumentative writing that can be expanded to other
content areas.

The Text-Set Project is a professional learning opportunity that
involves coaching and support in selecting the books and articles that could
form a solid text set, learning how to sequence the set effectively, and how to
support students in building knowledge about the world, words, and language
structure as they read the texts for themselves. District teams continue to produce
text sets that are comprised of annotated bibliographies, suggested sequencing
of texts, as well as suggested to provide a coherent learning experience for
students. This is accompanied by teacher instructions and supports, as well as
a variety of suggested tasks for ensuring students have learned from what they
have read. These sets reviewed by experts are currently available on Edmodo.
The Text Set Project group has grown to 2122 members and the code to join the
group is sma265.

For grades K-2, the Read-Aloud Project (RAP); participating
districts bring teams of curriculum, English language learning specialists, and
Special Education staff for two days of training and then take ownership for
writing text-dependent questions to go with chapter and picture books they
select for lesson planning. There are more than 150 RAP lessons that have been
vetted and posted on Edmodo. The RAP group has grown to over 5370 members. If you would like to join this group, the
code is pkx52i.